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Learning to Lay All Judgment Aside

For a long time I have tried to reconcile Truth and illusion, often not seeing that that was what I was doing. I would have a Holy Instant in which I would fully realize with all my being that “there is only God” and then, when I returned to an awareness of the world, I’d wonder what I just experienced meant for my life in the world. In light of this experience how should I live my life? What should I do with my life? What attitudes should I have? What criteria should I use to make decisions in the world? Of course I was instantly undoing with these questions what I had just learned in the Holy Instant because by asking them I was making the world real to myself again!There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. (W-132)

I’ve done this over and over and over again until it happened a couple of weeks ago and I finally accepted that I can never bring together what can never be brought together. There are no answers to these questions because it cannot be that “there is only God” and that there is also a world. Only one can be true and that is God. This means I must learn to take no thought for the world at all. I must stop limiting myself to a story of a personal self in a world. Any question of why or how only makes the world real to me. This gives me a deeper understanding of that old saying, “Why did Mohammed go to the mountain? Because it was there.” I must live wholly in this instant in the awareness that “there is only God” and not judge even what it seems like “I” am doing. I must let the ego thinks what it thinks; let the body do what it does. None of it matters; it is never real. Only God is Real.

I was told over a year ago that I had entered the “period of unsettling” described in the Development of Trust in the Manual for Teachers of A Course in Miracles and now I understand more fully what this means:

And now he must attain a state that may remain impossible to reach for a long, long time. He must learn to lay all judgment aside, and ask only what he really wants in every circumstance. Were not each step in this direction so heavily reinforced, it would be hard indeed! (M-4.I.A.9)

What Joy!

>>>>

Read The Message of A Course in Miracles: A translation of the Text in plain language at www.themessageofacim.com.

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Comments

JJ said…

Thank you Liz for this very humbling post.

You have hit on what I believe is the fundamental issue in any teaching about god. How do we live, knowing that only god is real? If a teaching cannot answer this question, then it is just like any other of the thousands of paths to pseudo-enlightenment.

The fact is we find ourselves here in physical bodies. Yes it may all be an illusion, but if only god is real, then this illusion has been created by god. Of course, ACIM says that God could not create anything unlike itself.

I can see an answer to this conundrum. It requires finding joy in paradox, the reconciliation of polar opposites. If you can hold two opposites in your mind at once and see them both as true, you will get it. You will be attached to neither. You will be free accepting all.

If there is no separation, then we are never separate from God. If we are never separate from god, then this apparent "reality" that we have created and are experiencing is part of us and part of god. Being inseparable from god, we, like god, cannot create anything unlike god. We created the illusion that this apparent reality is separate from god. We can see it as an illusion, separate from god, or we can see it as god. If we see it as god, we are accepting ourselves as god. If we are god, what would we do finding ourselves in this world in which everyone seems to believe that they are separate from god?

Does that thought bring a smile to your face? What would god do in this world, finding itself in my body? What would god do, seeing other expressions of itself, wandering lost and confused?

We are god. We are all children. How beautiful that we can know each other.

JJ, your post brings to mind the distinction the Course makes between "to create" and "to make". God is formless, Eternal, Infinite Being. God's "Creation", as the Course uses the term, is God extending God Infinitely and Eternally. The Course uses the verb "to make" for not-God. The physial universe was "made" from the idea of not-God. It is the opposite of God in every way - limited, time-bound form. God, being All, must contain even the idea of its own opposite but this idea is undone the instant it is thought because What is All-encompassing can have no opposite. Therefore it is an "illusion", not a "Creation", that exists only in the brief instant of the idea of not-God. This is what you see in the Holy Instant: Oneness has no opposite. There is only God.

What is "all-encompassing" MUST have an opposite. If there is anything it does not have, then by definition it is not all-encompassing.

Liz, all of the knowledge of God is not in the Course. Surely you know this. When you so diligently quote from the Course, you are demonstrating your doubt. You can access all knowledge and wisdom directly from the source. You do not need to lean on "scripture".

The point I was making in my post was that:

1. All IS god.2. The physical world is not an illusion separate from god.3. The only illusion is that anything can be separate from god.4. We are god. The world is our creation of an illusion that we have convinced ourselves is separate from god. We suffer because of this false illusion. In fact, everything is already god.5. Again, all is god.

JJ, I only know what I have experienced in the Holy Instant, in direct revelation of God, and through my experiences of Oneness in the Holy relationship. Without these experiences the Course would just be intellectual blather to me. It is because of these experiences that I am able to understand the words in the Course and to apply them to teaching. I have never yet had an experience of God that is inconsistent with the Course's teaching; the experiences lead me to a deeper reading. In the Holy Instant I know, "God is", and there is nothing else. Upon returning to an awareness of the world I see its nothingness; it has the consistency of vapor. So yes, God is All; God is Reality. There is only God.

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I have been a student of A Course in Miracles since 1984, a life coach since 2000, and a mentor for students of A Course in Miracles and 4 Habits for Inner Peace since 2006. You can learn more about me and what I offer at my website, www.acimmentor.com.